I kind of want to push back on this on Revealed Preferences grounds.
This is not exactly a new take - lefties have been lobbing the "Republicans have never actually cared about austerity" line for decades now. But somehow, whenever we go back over to the discussion of comparing American right-wing parties to Europe's, against everything we already know and tell each other about the GOP's revealed preferences, we still keep treating them as a monolith dominated by their "True Austerity Has Never Been Tried" caucus.
So to me, "Wow, the median GOP member is to the right of the typical European center-right party's median member!" is naively misjudging the fundamental realities of each ecosystem. The typical European center-right party doesn't *have* a True Austerity caucus pulling their median to the right, because those guys have their *own* party.
The GOP's revealed preferences show that its center-right normie core is mostly just about as tolerant of the welfare state as, say, the CDU or Tories. And although the CDU and Tories *are* still subject to competition and ideological cross-pollination from the rest of the right, the main difference is that in the absence of a national primary structure partitioning the entire right from the entire left, the CDU and Tories don't have to always be cross-endorsing UKIP and AfD in *national elections* in the same way as the normie GOP establishment felt forced to legitimize the Tea Party after they won some primaries.
From The Comments: Revealed Preferences
From The Comments: Revealed Preferences
From The Comments: Revealed Preferences
>>But you don’t see the turn taken by European conservative parties where they are generally willing to pay the tab for the existing welfare state, even though our welfare state is much smaller and has a commensurately smaller tab.
I kind of want to push back on this on Revealed Preferences grounds.
This is not exactly a new take - lefties have been lobbing the "Republicans have never actually cared about austerity" line for decades now. But somehow, whenever we go back over to the discussion of comparing American right-wing parties to Europe's, against everything we already know and tell each other about the GOP's revealed preferences, we still keep treating them as a monolith dominated by their "True Austerity Has Never Been Tried" caucus.
So to me, "Wow, the median GOP member is to the right of the typical European center-right party's median member!" is naively misjudging the fundamental realities of each ecosystem. The typical European center-right party doesn't *have* a True Austerity caucus pulling their median to the right, because those guys have their *own* party.
The GOP's revealed preferences show that its center-right normie core is mostly just about as tolerant of the welfare state as, say, the CDU or Tories. And although the CDU and Tories *are* still subject to competition and ideological cross-pollination from the rest of the right, the main difference is that in the absence of a national primary structure partitioning the entire right from the entire left, the CDU and Tories don't have to always be cross-endorsing UKIP and AfD in *national elections* in the same way as the normie GOP establishment felt forced to legitimize the Tea Party after they won some primaries.